Yes, we’re taking a trip to Stop City tomorrow. Today’s broad market weakness took a few of our names down with it. Some are exits taking profits, others are stop losses. We welcome them all. Once a stop is hit we cut our losses, once an uptrend is over we take our profit. What’s left are positions with trends and entry rationales intact, and we run those until that’s no longer the case. It’s a simple business.

We will exit longs in Corning ($GLW), Stryker ($SYK), Exxon-Mobil ($XOM), and Marathon Petroleum ($MPC), all at Thursday’s open. Let’s take a look at each of them.

We had liked this as a longer-term recovery play so we’ll watch to see if it sets up again, but I can’t justify staying with it after today’s move. It made a nice recovery last week coming close to reclaiming the 20EMA, but today broke the 50-day by gapping and following through, and on increased volume too. Goodbye.

Another one with a ‘gap and crap’ move today. It’s had some marginal breaks with the 50-day before but there’s no ambiguity with today’s move, sliced through, new lower low, and took out the ascending trendline too.

This has been messy for a while with a few false starts that never quite invalidated until now. It’s broken back below the 20/50/200 MA’s in one fell swoop, as well as the descending trendline underpinning the uptrend.

This is one of those positions that was never working well from the outset. We mentioned in our entry post that anything more than a temporary visit to the $79.93-$77.38 zone would warn us it may be tracing out a more complex pattern and we got the answer today with a slump to May’s lows. Even if it manages to hold here, realistically it’s got a lot more work to do before it sets up as an attractive risk-reward trade for us.

Jon Boorman, CMT, is a portfolio manager and market technician with over 25 years experience in global markets. He employs trend following and momentum strategies to generate actionable trade ideas. More....